There's an uncomfortable truth making the rounds in AI startup circles. A lot of companies exist simply because OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google haven't gotten around to their use case yet.
It's become something of a dark joke among founders. You're not really competing with other startups in your space. You're racing to build enough value before a foundation model company decides your category is worth their attention.
The pattern is already clear. Features that were entire companies six months ago are now checkbox items in ChatGPT or Claude. Code completion tools, basic image generation, simple automation workflows. All absorbed into the platforms.
This matters if you're building on AI or evaluating AI tools for your work. That specialized solution you're considering might be redundant in a year. Or it might evolve into something the big players can't easily replicate.
The startups that seem to understand this are moving fast in two directions. Either they're going incredibly niche where foundation models won't bother, or they're building deep integrations and workflows that are harder to commoditize.
The 12-month window isn't a hard rule, but it's a useful mental model. If your AI startup's main feature could be a GPT-4 plugin or a Claude prompt, you're probably on borrowed time.
